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Whitehall to bury bad news on green performance on last day of Copenhagen

If you were a Whitehall civil servant and you had to release figures that will almost certainly show that central government departments have delivered a, shall we say, patchy performance against environmental targets, what day of the year would you choose to release them?

Yup, you've guessed it. An email from the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) arrives this afternoon revealing it will publish data showing how government departments are performing against their own sustainability targets at 9am on Friday December 18, just as world leaders convene in Copenhagen for the last day of the Summit to Save the World.

A quick phone call to a dimension governed by different rules of plausibility to the one you and I inhabit (otherwise known as the OGC's press office) confirms that there is nothing untoward whatsoever about this arrangement.

It is also preposterous to suggest the scheduling consititutes an attempt to sneak out the figures at a time when the all the UK's environmental journalists are focused firmly on developments on the other side of the North Sea.

A diary notification has been issued, adds the spokesman, and the release date for the information has been scheduled for some time. Besides, it is also the same date the information was released last year - so that would be right at the culmination of the last big UN climate change summit in Poznan then.

Is it just me, or does The Thick of It look more like a documentary every day?